Mr Balls said he had accepted all the recommendations of an independent review into the Vetting and Barring Scheme.

Adults will now only have to be vetted if they see the same group of children or vulnerable people once a week or more, rather than once a month.

Anyone aged 18 or under in education will be exempted, as will parents who host pupils on exchange trips lasting less than 28 days, and authors who visit schools to read from their books. There is also an exemption for overseas visitors bringing groups of children to see the Olympic games in 2012.

Meanwhile Mr Balls is also setting out plans for investment in children's services despite a ferocious public sector spending squeeze.

But although his department has secured a rare budget increase despite the fiscal situation, schools are nevertheless likely to see cuts in some areas.

Mr Balls was the big winner in last week's Pre-Budget Report with a 0.7 per cent real terms rise in schools spending at a time when other departmental budgets are being frozen or facing the prospect of deep cuts.

But he will use a two-year update on the Government's Children's Plan, to highlight the need for "efficiency savings" to fund investment across the wider range of children's services.

"Our mission is to make this the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up," he will say.

"We need to build on the progress we have made through the first two years of the Children's Plan by working together, continuing to invest in our front line services, and making efficiencies that will deliver more from our investment for children."

Despite the climb-down on vetting, there were warnings that mothers who helped out at their local nursery might still need to be vetted, as might fathers who took other people’s children to games once a week.

A spokesman for the Manifesto Club, a civil liberties group, said: "The essential absurdities of this scheme, and its founding assumption that we are all potential paedophiles until proven otherwise, remain unchallenged.

"Ordinary people will still have to register on this vetting database – and be subjected to constant criminal records vetting – for carrying out the most natural and everyday activities, working and volunteering with children.”

Michael Gove, the shadow Schools secretary, added: “Parents, teachers and volunteers across the country are united in recognising that the vetting and barring scheme had to change.

“Ed Balls' moves are welcome but there are still fundamental problems which need to be addressed if we're to have a proper focus on keeping children safe and a society built on trust in which volunteers are instinctively respected.”

Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy who became the most high-profile critic of the safeguarding regime, said he welcomed the proposed changes to the "absurd" plans.

He said: "We have managed without this for years and there's no need to introduce this kind of regulation now."